Daily Search Forum Recap: May 14, 2019

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

SEO Test Proves New GoogleBot Is Live
Valentin Pletzer didn't want to just take Google's word that the new evergreen GoogleBot is live, so he tested it. In short, Google's word was the truth and the new GoogleBot is indeed live.

Google: Don't Just Blindly Delete Old Pages
Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that it doesn't necessarily make sense to just go into your content management system and delete old pages after a certain date. John said "FWIW sometimes good, old stuff becomes interesting again over time, so you might want to avoid just blindly deleting everything over a certain age."

Steven Levy: Google Search Results Overrates Freshness As A Ranking Signal
Steven Levy, the tech reporter that most tech reporters look up to. He has interviewed legends of tech, has access to companies like Google and Apple more than others. He is a legend and when he called out Google's search algorithm for failing him and searchers yesterday, Google's Danny Sullivan noticed and went on the defensive.

Google: New GoogleBot & Indexing Bugs Unrelated
Google's Martin Splitt said the new GoogleBot has zero impact or was completely unrelated to the indexing bugs we saw back in April. He said "Fair question, but no" when I asked if they were related at all.

Google Rolled Out The New GoogleBot Over Several Months
Just an FYI, Google did not simply flip the switch last week and turn on the new GoogleBot, the evergreen GoogleBot, over night. Google said it was already indexing 10% of the web back in November. It scaled from less than 1%, to 1%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 75%, to 100% over several months and just reached 100% last week.

Peter The Greeter - Welcomes Everyone To Google
We saw this guy numerous times, in fact, I see him come up in Google photos numerous times a day. He calls himself Peter The Greeter and says he greets everyone who comes to the Google sign at the Go